In a recent post to his site Sahand Saba has posted a list of nine anti-patterns every programmer should avoid. This list isn't language specific and ranges in types of advice from general programming practices down to more specific "code smells" to avoid. The code examples are in Python but you can interpolate them into the world of PHP pretty easily.

A healthy dose of self-criticism is fundamental to professional and personal growth. When it comes to programming, this sense of self-criticism requires the ability to detect unproductive or counter-productive patterns in designs, code, processes, and behaviour. This is why a knowledge of anti-patterns is very useful for any programmer. This article is a discussion of anti-patterns that I have found to be recurring, ordered roughly based on how often I have come across them, and how long it took to undo the damage they caused.

The list of nine includes things like:

• Premature Optimization
• God Class
• Inner-platform Effect
• Management by Numbers

Each item on the list includes a few subheadings talking about what it is, why it's bad, how to avoid it and some code examples (where appropriate) to find it in your code.